


Why Can't I Sleep At Night

by Overdressedtokill (SkyeStan)



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-28
Updated: 2013-11-28
Packaged: 2018-01-02 20:59:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1061572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkyeStan/pseuds/Overdressedtokill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m fine,” Skye protests, sliding her hands down his back.  “I’ve taken much, much worse.  You’re really warm.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why Can't I Sleep At Night

 

Here is the abridged list of list of "Things Grant Ward Hates": loud noises.  People.  Neon colors.  This hellhole is a combination of all three.  He wonders, as his head throbs to the beat of the bass, if he’s lost his damn mind.

 

Skye might be younger than him (though he still doesn’t know her real age), but she’s definitely old enough to decide whether or not she can go to a rave.  In Berlin.  At 1 in the morning.  Ward gets it.  He does, better than she realizes.  The need to forget when you’ve fucked up.  But it’s more than that.  They’re so rarely on ground for a night.  He sees her staring out the windows sometimes.  There’s a nagging feeling that she’s unhappy.  Caged.

 

Someone grabs Ward’s ass as he tries to make his way through the crowd.  When he looks over his shoulder they’re gone, disappeared into the indiscernible mass of bodies in neon paint.  He should find her.  He has to find her.

 

 He’s just spent an hour wandering the streets of Berlin with nothing but the blip of her monitor bracelet on a map to guide him, and though he feels a migraine blooming in his temples he does not give up so easily.

 

Pink.  Skye is a blur of pink, dancing with her hands over her head.  Open.  Grinning.  He notices the strangers around her, men who grab her hips and how she’ll let them, if only for a few beats of the booming song.  Ward does not want to watch her dance.

 

He brings her into his arms and for a faint second she does not recognize him, her eyes are half lidded and it’s dark and-

“Are you high?” he asks.  She blinks in the dim lights.  Once.  Twice.

“Ward?” she says, “when did you get here?”  She lets a lazy grin spread across her face.  She tangles her fingers into his hair, and she’s pressed against him, trying to make him dance.  He pulls her back.

“Are you high?” he repeats.  She tosses her head back, slowly rolling her neck, her shoulders.  She gazes up at him with hazy eyes.

"Listen, don't get mad, okay? I might've taken a little tiny baby dose of ecstasy."  She yells this at him over the bass of the speakers, like it’s a completely normal thing to say.  She doesn’t have the decency to look ashamed, or maybe she’s just too high, but she’s back to grinning at him and there’s neon pink paint on her checks, glowing in the dark.

 

“You what?” he yells back.  The information takes a moment to hit his brain, in no small part because Skye is dancing against him.  “Skye, you took ecstasy?!”

“I’m fine,” she protests, sliding her hands down his back.  “I’ve taken much, much worse.  You’re really warm.”  She nestles against his chest without warning.  He does not want to dwell on the statement of “much, much worse.”  He does not want to think that this is the most she’s ever told him of her past, and she’s not even coherent.

“Why aren’t you dancing?” she demands, grabbing his hips.  “Dance with me.  You’re hot.  I’m hot.  We should dance!”  He wraps his fingers around her wrists, trying and failing to ignore the way she grins and laughs and shakes in the din of the nightclub.

 

She has always been his opposite.  But this is an extreme.

 

“I came to take you home,” he says, and that’s when she shakes off his grip.

“No,” she protests.  “Dance with me.”  She sways under the lights and she looks, for a fleeting moment, like a different person entirely.  It scares him.  Truly, deeply scares him, like he’s watching her drown while tied to the shore.

 

It’s not the drugs.  He wishes it was.

 

“I was worried about you,” he says.  She does not stop dancing.  He wants to still her.  He wants to make the room go still.  “Skye!”  She looks at him through her lashes.  She licks her lips.  The pink paint is on his hands.  He doesn’t know how it got there.  Had he touched her, when she’d pressed against him?  Had he dug his fingers into her hips like someone might pull her away?  Pink.  Caked under his nails.

 

“You’re so hot,” she says.  It’s the molly talking.  She presses her hands to his face.  “You’re really, really hot.”  She’s going to kiss him.  He presses his hand against her collarbone.

“Let me take you home,” he says.  She won’t stop smiling.

“I don’t have a home, baby,” she returns, and the word _baby_ sounds cruel and wrong on her lips.  It sounds like she’s said it, all of it, a thousand times before.  He shouldn’t have lost sight of her.  At the bar.  He should’ve kept an eye on her.  She’d wandered off.

 

Skye is a grown up.  He is a grown up.  They make shitty decisions.

 

“You’re so warm,” she repeats.  He touches her, again.  Wraps her in his arms.

“Let’s go,” he says to her.  Like they were in love.  Like that.  She picks up on it, nuzzling her head against his chin.  Her hand grabs his hand and he pulls, through the crowd and makes sure that her hand stays firmly in his.

 

It is cold in Berlin.  Ward gives Skye his coat, lets her wrap it around her tiny shoulders.  He doesn’t know if she has a jacket of her own, if she brought it, where she left it.  The street lamps don’t do her justice.  She sways still, even though the music has quieted.  She traces her feet along the cracks of the sidewalk.

 

Skye is high.  Skye is beautiful, and she will not let him in.

 

Grant Ward is scared.  Of what, he only faintly knows.


End file.
